


Gotham Is A Mother

by Kieron_ODuibhir



Category: Batman (Comics), Batman - All Media Types, DCU
Genre: Alfred is a major character for only having one line, Angst, Classism, Crazy Jason has a point, Families of Choice, Father-Son Relationship, Gen, Gotham City - Freeform, Meta, Or not, Red Hood - Freeform, a real mother, came back wrong, jason always had mommy issues though, oversized guns, parenting, seriously
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-07-18
Updated: 2014-07-18
Packaged: 2018-02-09 08:34:12
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,066
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1976220
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Kieron_ODuibhir/pseuds/Kieron_ODuibhir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Hey, Batman. No sudden movements, huh?"</p>
            </blockquote>





	Gotham Is A Mother

It was carelessness, on Batman's part. Simple, arrogant lack of attention.

Maybe he’d gotten too used to having someone to watch his back, but whatever the reason, he had paid far too little mind to his surroundings. Kneeling on the roof of the Ephraim-Pryce building, examining the concrete for any evidence that might have been missed by the cursory police investigation earlier that day, his sight and most of his attention had been on the ground; his hearing had been attuned to the police band he had playing in one ear. There was a major drug raid scheduled tonight, for which he might be required to swing over and lend support to the officers. Thus far the GCPD had yet to make its move, and the radio chatter had been only the usual. Part of his mind had been already planning the rest of the night's patrol.

Of course, it wasn’t unreasonable to expect to be completely alone on the roof of an office building in the small hours of a late autumn night. It was inexcusable to have assumed it.

“Hey Batman,” a low, familiar voice had said, a hint of a laugh caught in its creases, “no sudden movements, huh?”

The remark had been punctuated by the familiar clink of a large-caliber handgun. Dozens of two-bit hoods had thought that that line and that threat were enough to contain him; that they were in control because they had the gun. They had always been wrong. But this was different.

Slowly, he’d turned, his fingers braced on the roof surface. “Jason.”

The Red Hood was without his helmet tonight; below a red domino mask he wore a slightly manic grin. He was neatly just out of range of a lunge, and had his gun—it appeared to be the grossly excessive cannon that was an Arcadia AutoMag V, which fired half-inch rounds; a slightly more maneuverable weapon than the comparable and more common Desert Eagle, but with similar recoil problems—leveled precisely on the weakest point in Batman’s neck-armor. “Fancy meeting you here.”

He would not rise to the bait.

“Did you kill Emily Dawson?” Batman asked levelly. The assistant DA had plunged nineteen stories to her death from this rooftop at nine AM the previous morning. It was being considered a suicide, for now, but while Dawson had been acting somewhat off in recent weeks, there had been no reason she should have thrown herself off this particular building, which housed mostly office space for companies belonging to the Kane family, and whose main claim to fame was some rather fine carving in the gargoyles at the corners.

One witness thought he might have seen someone else on the roof when she fell. Dawson had in life performed her duties responsibly. There were therefore a number of people, mostly in organized crime, who would have had ample motive to have her killed, and preferably discredited in the bargain.

Jason pursed his lips in a small, mocking whistle. “Murderer always returns to the scene? Nah, not me. I heard a rumor Falconi was calling for her head a while back, but he’s got bigger fish to fry, so maybe it was personal and the perp thought they’d use the mob as a cover.”

Hearing Jason make deductions in the way Bruce had taught him was just another form of a now-familiar pain. He didn’t bother to concur, let alone argue. Jason jerked his head toward the edge of the roof, a few feet away. “Why don’t you have a seat?”

Slowly, Batman moved sideways toward the nineteen-story drop, keeping his eyes on the man with the gun. He didn’t think Jason would try to kill him by dropping him off this building, tonight, especially right after an apparently-unconnected death of the same type. It wouldn’t be appropriately climactic. Jason had always had a taste for drama; the new Jason seemed positively obsessed. Besides, a fall in this city, his city, was unlikely to kill him. Jason of all people knew how well Bruce knew how to fall.

“Come on, sit down,” Jason coaxed, that amusement still sifting from his voice, as he spoke as if Bruce was a guest in his home. “Relax a little.” He sank down himself, dangling his feet over the distant street, but his gun never left Batman’s neck, and the smirk never left his face.

Bruce got the point. A crouch was too dynamic a posture, and left him too many options for motion. As in any hostage situation, the victim was put in an increasingly defenseless position.

Batman did not like being a victim.

For the moment, though, there was nothing he could do but wait until Jason’s attention wandered. There were desperate gambits possible, but the situation as it stood was not dire enough to merit any of their risks. His best option at the moment, if he wished to exit the scenario, was jumping. He couldn’t ready his grapple without warning Jason and risking a preemptive shot, but if necessary he could ready it as he fell. Jason would be prepared for that.

Jason’s off-hand held a long single-edged knife with a heavy pommel—not Ra’s al Ghul’s signature _keris_ dagger with its wavering blade, that he’d carried at first, like a sign of who had helped to do this to him, but still dangerous in its own right.

“Night like this, a guy gets nostalgic,” Jason said, as Batman followed him in treating the high-rise as a chair. “Up high like this, in the quiet, looking down on everyone.”

There was a twist in that last phrase Bruce presumed was aimed at him. “Just like the good old days,” he replied tonelessly.

Red Hood’s domino mask flexed with raised eyebrows. “Was that a _joke_ , Batman?”

“No.” Maybe. Maybe just sarcasm. It grew harder all the time to remember the boy Jason had been, at first merely as time came between them and he pushed memory aside to live in the present, and then as new impressions of this mad adult Jason began to overlay the memories.

He caught himself sometimes in these encounters grasping fragments of speech, things the old Jason might have said as well, trying to twist the sound of the man’s voice back enough to remember the way the boy had sounded, that brave, bright boy.

Enough. There were some video segments back at the cave, of old training sessions mostly, if he wished to torture himself.

“Alfred was horrified, you know,” Jason said, conversationally, as if he wasn’t really changing the subject, as if he didn’t have a gun pointed at Bruce’s throat.

“I do,” Bruce agreed. Pleased enough to let violence be deferred, and maybe if Jason remembered Alfred fondly, with less rage than Bruce had earned, they could build on that. “But mostly he’s worried.”

“Nah, I mean, this one time, when I was a kid? I pointed out to him the dress-ups just weren’t scared enough of you, because they all _knew_ , to a certainty, that you wouldn’t kill them. He tried to keep up the face, you know, stiff upper lip, but I could tell. He was freaked out that a fourteen-year-old thought like that.”

Jason snorted. “Like he expected me to be innocent, or like he thought I’d come up with the idea of death threats _all by myself_. Don’t get me wrong, I love the old man, but seriously.”

“He was worried,” Bruce reiterated.

“Yeah, that I’d turn out like this.” The hand holding a knife flicked unconcernedly toward himself in his leather and guilt. “Regular psychic, that Jeeves. Seriously, though, did he _get_ that I lived on my own in Crime Alley for three years? And with a single useless parent for three years before that? That my dad got shot by his boss for no real reason when I was six, and I watched my mom die by inches until I was nine, and the first murder victim I ever saw was my neighbor from two doors down when I was _four?_ ”

That last was something Bruce had _never known before this moment_ , and his stomach clenched harder than he’d known it could. Seeing to Jason’s forensic education had made it clear he’d already had some experience with corpses, but that he’d lost that much innocence so soon still hurt to hear, even now.

He should have made sure the boy got professional help, from the beginning. Just because he had chosen to cope with violence as his therapy of choice didn’t mean it was advisable; he doubted he had a single acquaintance who could with a straight face call him a picture of sanity. Of course, it was hard to undergo effective counseling when up to your neck in secrets, which was right where he’d put Jason from the day he brought him home.

His self-recrimination had eaten the time he might have used to respond to those rhetorical questions about Alfred’s perspective on Jason’s childhood. Apparently deciding Batman had nothing to say, Jason took the floor again, speaking in a casual, rambling manner that was a little too intense to pass as mere conversation, even without the gun.

“People control other people through threats and violence,” he stated. “That’s normal. You get that. It’s your whole _motif_. There are things people can’t stand to lose; that’s how fear works. The threat of losing those things, whatever they are. And people at the bottom of the ladder, they’re afraid _all the time_. Because they don’t have much, and it’s easy to lose everything, and there is _nothing they can do about it._

“There are things worse than death,” Jason added, shrugging a little. He seemed to be relying on his words more than his gun now to hold Bruce in place. He wasn’t wrong. “I’ve seen you cause some of them, on purpose and by accident. But death is easy. Death is simple. Death is equal.”

A laugh reentered his voice for a moment. “ _Most_ of the time, people you kill can’t come back and screw you over. And people with nothing to lose…well, what else can you do with ‘em?”

Jason swung his heels over the drop, like a child, like he’d used to when _he_ was a child, sitting in too-tall kitchen chairs and complaining about their height. A picture of unconcern.

“There are _plenty_ of options besides killing,” growled Bruce.

“Really? Is that what you’ve learned? Going up against lunatics who fight you _on purpose_ —are they terrified of the Bat? No. They know there’s nothing you can do to them that you haven’t already done, so they’ll never stop.” The Joker, he meant mostly, of course, but Penguin too, Riddler, Ivy, Killer Croc—the whole menagerie.

Jason made a sweeping gesture with his knife as if to include the whole Gotham skyline. “And the street level crime—people have to live. They aren’t more scared of you than they are of starving. Of watching their kids starve. Never will be. Ever.”

“And so you think it’s better to _kill_ them for crossing those lines, even when they might have children starving at home?”

“Can’t feed your kids from prison any better than you can from the grave. I _think_ that once you find out crime works, you need one hell of a reason to stop, even once you aren’t desperate anymore. A threat. That’s the whole _idea_ of having laws and jails, you know? But prison isn’t enough. _You_ aren’t enough. So I am.”

“Are you.” He felt entirely justified in his skepticism. Jason had operated in Gotham quite extensively, and while he had thoroughly cowed much of the local drug market and given Black Mask a _very_ hard time, mostly by killing his underlings and blowing up his merchandise, he hadn’t significantly cut the crime rate.

Partly, of course, that would be because of all the _arson_ and _murder_ of organized crime affiliates.

Jason might not consider that a negative, but Bruce _did_ , dammit, and not just because he was stiff-necked and controlling, or even just because he didn’t want Jason doing this to himself. Most of those people did have families. All of them were _people._

“Well, I’d be doing better if Batman wasn’t forever getting in my way.”

“Killing more, you mean.”

Jason shrugged. “I told you once you’ve never understood Gotham.”

Bruce remembered. It had been a terrible night, when Jason's mask came off, the blow hardly softened by the fact that he’d been suspecting for weeks. Maybe made worse, since he hadn’t had the comfort of shock to blunt the pain of it, of the hard knowledge that the boy he’d failed had returned to him as a monster.

He dipped his head. “That it’s evil, as I recall.”

Jason nodded, like a teacher encouraging a relatively bright pupil. It would have been ironic, if it hadn’t been so calculated. “You _know_ the city, I’ll give you that. You’ve spent almost every night of your adult life with her, you’ve studied her every crevice, listened to her whole history. You hear her voice, and she owns you.”

Bruce suppressed a shiver at that. It wasn’t untrue, he could admit that, but hearing it stated in Jason’s current sepulchral voice sent a feeling of foreboding through him.

“But even though you were born here…you aren’t _of_ Gotham, not really. You, with your Bristol accent and your thirty cars?”

He clenched his teeth. “The accent is losable.” Batman had almost no trace of it. Talking like a socialite would hardly instill fear. Since the beginning he’d cultivated a hint of the staccato bite that marked a ‘true’ Gothamite, the same accent Jason spoke with naturally, and carefully emphasized the rounded upper-class tones in Bruce Wayne’s public persona. Never too many layers of disguise.

“But it’s _yours,_ ” Jason pressed. “You know as well as I do the high society isn’t the real city, and even if she left a mark on you young, you didn’t really get close and personal with that _real_ until you were in your twenties. Dickiebird was adopted by the city as much as by you, and he’s forever moving on, and Replacement’s from almost the same aristocratic distance as you, and your little demon, eh, he’s only just adjusting to this _continent_.

“Me, though…I’ve spent a few years away from this city, sure. And I _hate_ the place. It’s an evil, unsalvageable devourer of lives and souls and dreams. There’s nothing worth fighting for here. But it’s home. I know it, deeper than my bones. I was born to it. I was fighting on these streets almost as soon as I could walk; Crime Alley to you was one night when you were eight, but for me it was every single day from before I can remember.

“You’re married to Gotham, sure. But she’s _my_ mother.”

Bruce could hardly speak. He blamed that fact for the words that came out of his mouth: “Last time you put yourself on the line for your mother—”

“I got myself killed, yeah. But see, that’s because I was still lying to myself then. Looking for a mom to love me and coddle me and tell me I was the _best_. Now I’m being a realist: Mom is going to take everything I have, and then stand by and watch me get beat down, and I’m gonna stand up and give everything all over again, and get smarter about it every time.”

So bleak, to say with that white-toothed grin.

“Well,” said Bruce, still reeling, refusing to show it, “as a mother, how do you think she likes seeing you gun down your brothers and sisters?” After all, the vast majority of Jason’s kills had come from that same background—Gotham’s own, by his stated definition, if ever there were any. And…as a parent…

His second son grinned a shark’s grin at him. “Are you kidding?” he asked, with every evidence of delighted amusement. “Mom _loves_ that kind of thing.”

He shouldn’t be surprised; Jason had called the city ‘mother’ but he’d also called it ‘evil.’ Cold and dark and cruel, and never expected to help him any more than Sheila had, even as much as Catherine had.

“You don’t want a parent like that,” Bruce said. It came out as an assertion, but it felt more like pleading.

Jason jerked a one-shouldered shrug. “I may hate her, but she needs me. Long as there’s a Gotham, there’s work for the Red Hood. I can make a difference, Batman. More than you ever have.”

His certainty was chilling.

“And the city isn’t going anywhere,” Jason added.

“Not if I have anything to say about it,” Bruce confirmed, reminded too sharply of the catastrophe that had been No Man’s Land.

Jason chuckled. “Of course, if it does, I guess I’m free to move on.”

“How filial.” The sarcasm came too easily, but it was safest, with Jason in this strange, mad, half-sincere mood, and the heavy, hateful gun still trained on him.

The Red Hood waved his left hand dismissively, knife slicing air. “Yeah, well, y’know, I’ve had the two parents that died on me and the two that threw me away like trash, and I gotta say, the first was way easier to take.”

Bruce felt his blood turn to ice, as it often did around Jason these days.

His son had just classed him with Sheila Haywood. The woman who’d abandoned him at birth, and fifteen years later sold him to the Joker to cover up her own crimes, when he’d thrown his whole heart and trust at her feet and done everything he could for her, reckless of his own well-being.

For all the distance and anger between them, for all his attempts to give up on Jason for good, for all the crimes the boy-turned-madman had committed, that judgment _hurt_. And he couldn’t even call it entirely unjust.

And…Jason preferred Willis Todd as a father.

It had never hurt (much) to know that Dick would rather have been raised by John Grayson. After all, Bruce certainly knew what it was to lose a father, and want him back, knew he could never have measured up even if he’d been a truly excellent parent. But Jason had never missed Willis. Never shown any sign of caring for Willis. Willis had, Bruce was almost sure, sometimes hit his little son. Willis had been the same kind of lowlife Jason now slaughtered with such zeal.

“You know I would have died in your place if I could,” Bruce said softly, abruptly.

Jason stared at him for a second and a half longer than he would have if he hadn’t had to shake off surprise. Let out a laugh that was so like the ones he used to give as they jumped into a fray together, and yet nothing like it at all. “Yeah,” he agreed emptily.

“Jason,” Bruce tried, because even if he could never bring the boy back, even if he was never forgiven for his role in Robin’s death, Jason needed to believe that. He needed to be able to trust that he had mattered, and even if Bruce had never been able to say _I love you,_ could never offer the bloody proof Jason demanded, he could say this, he could offer his life.

The gun fired.

Batman had been ready. He rolled back out of the way of the bullet, counting on the heavy recoil from firing such a weapon one-handed to protect him from any immediate repetition of rounds that he knew could punch straight through his armour, flung a Batarang at Jason’s projected position, more to buy time than in any expectation of hitting, deflected a pistol-whip with his vambrace and then ducked, sharply, as the motion with which Jason fell back warned of another shot.

That bullet tore through his flaring cape, and then he’d taken his own shot and lodged a Batarang in the muzzle of the gun, making it useless for the immediate future, and Jason stowed the weapon with an irritated growl and slashed at Batman’s face with the knife in his other hand.

Batman deflected it, and Jason fell back a step, but then he was grinning, and Bruce saw what he’d pulled out with his free hand while distracting his opponent with that attack: round and dark. _Grenade._ Fragmentary, defensive-range. Jason pulled the pin, gave the deadly object a gentle upward toss. Stood where he was, posture perfectly relaxed.

Batman surged forward, clotheslined Jason around waist and neck, _flung_ him halfway across the roof, and hit the ground wrapped in his cape just as the grenade burst.

 _Pain_ , as the shrapnel flung outward by the explosion studded his back. None of the injuries felt too serious; the shards of metal had slowed considerably getting through his suit and cape. The deepest were the two that had entered where the cape’s fabric had already been torn by Jason’s earlier shot.

Hands turned him onto his side, checked his breathing, pulled something off his belt.

“Prison,” Jason’s voice said, falling back, “a beating, a _maiming,_ a life of crime…all of that, all those ‘threats,’ there’s still _hope_ ; you survive, you pick yourself up, there’s something left _._ But you know what they say, Bruce: _There is no hope in Crime Alley._ ”

There was the familiar sound of a firing grapple-gun, and Bruce gained his feet again only to find himself alone on the roof, Jason just disappearing at the end of the block on Bruce’s own jumpline.

He had a spare, of course, but closing Jason’s lead with the shrapnel in his back would be an unpleasant and probably pointless exercise. He wouldn’t be taking the Red Hood in tonight. He never had put in the necessary effort against Jason, he knew; had not found his current hideout or altered patrol routes to intercept him. People were dying in his city because he had trouble confronting the man. Trouble sending his son to Arkham Asylum like any other murderous lunatic.

 _His_ son? Jason had lived on the streets for as long as he had in the Manor. Jason had been his enemy, now, for longer than he’d been his partner.

And yet still his.

The Red Hood was based somewhere in Crime Alley. There was no doubt in Batman’s mind, especially after tonight.

 _There is no hope in Crime Alley._ An old Gotham truism, by this time, which in itself made Bruce feel old.

He refused to believe there was no hope for Jason. Neither as Batman nor as Bruce Wayne was he a particularly optimistic person, but he was stubborn, and whenever he did find a spark of hope, he held fast to it. Jason was…not wrong to say that he had always feared the boy would be overcome by his own anger like this, become someone Batman had to fight, but…Jason had been his Robin. Jason had been his son. He had doubted his restraint, doubted it bitterly, but not his heart. Jason had had such a good heart.

He had failed him. But he would not give him up.

_Would God I had died for thee, oh Absalom, my son, my son!_

“In a heartbeat,” Batman told the empty night.

And although it was only three-thirty AM, he got into a car that still had all its tires, and slowly drove home. The police raid had gone off without a hitch. Emily Dawson would still be dead tomorrow, and there would be no evidence left on that rooftop now.

“How was your evening, sir?” Alfred inquired, with that same dry poise Bruce had depended on all his life.

Batman climbed out of the car, hiding his stiffness as best he could even though there was no one here he had to hide things from, stripped back the cowl, and met Alfred’s eyes with the wryest of expressions. “Jason says he loves you,” he offered. And, “I’m going to need your help with some shrapnel.”

The knowing, pained expression in the old man’s eyes, his patient acceptance, the way he turned away to medical supplies laid ready with a suppressed tremble…it all added up to something Bruce had learned when he was eight years old.

People you love are the most terrible thing in the world.

 

**Author's Note:**

> You may have noticed that while Bruce heard Jason say he preferred Willis Todd as a father, what he actually *said* was that Willis dying hurt a lot less than Bruce giving up on him. These two have the worst communication problems even when they actually talk.


End file.
